World War Two Will Not Take Place

by Bill James

  Chiming with the club’s name, there were Spanish themes, but muted. Genuine, slightly faded yellow and red posters from last year advertising bull fights in Toledo decorated one wall, plus framed photographs of matadors at work in the ring; and there was one photo of bearded American novelist Ernest Hemingway – a great bullfight fan – beaming and brandishing his famous book about the sport, Death In The Afternoon. Mount disliked the title. Mawkish. Flamboyant. People and animals had died in afternoons ever since there were people and animals, so why make it special to bullfights? Half a dozen bright-metalled sabres were fixed to another wall of the club, as well as some photographs of fencing bouts. Toledo had a world reputation for steel manufacture, particularly its blades.

  The mahogany bar was long and built with a gentle, friendly curve. It invited you to come to it and relax. It spoke to Mount of civilization. Small tables and straight-backed chairs, also mahogany, occupied the central area of the big room, with shadowy booths off, each with a table and leather armchairs. An upright piano stood on a band platform at one end, and next to it a small square for dancing was marked out with thin lines of white paint. The Toledo had order. Floral patterns in subdued colours on dark-red wallpaper gave a feeling of warmth and cosiness, despite the swords. The wall behind the bar was covered by a huge, gleaming mirror that caught all the busy to-and-froing.

  Mount thought Toulmin showed taste in settling on the Toledo as right for him, and in setting up a happy arrangement with two of its girls, perhaps more, though Mount knew only the two. Most of the Berlin clubs familiar to Mount had poor furniture, little space, dark, bare walls – noisy drinking shops, nothing better. You wouldn’t come across girls of Inge’s and Olga’s calibre in that sort of shabby pit, or at any rate not while they were still young, arses radiantly undropped. He badly needed to find Inge and Olga tonight.

  The last thirty-six hours leading up to this Wednesday-night call at the club had been full of confusion for Mount: some very poor stuff, some quite good. Despite all his ins and outs at the Lichtenberg apartment, he’d failed to reach Toulmin or discover what had been going on. This was frustrating. All right, late on that Monday, he’d eventually found Toulmin; or, more like it, Toulmin had found him, by turning up at Steglitz, followed by Inge and Olga. And Toulmin’s breakfast account the next morning of events at Moscow had been brilliantly full, of course, and an entirely unexpected boon. During Toulmin’s unexplained disappearance, Mount had a very guarded talk with SB from a post-office telephone. ‘The business man I hoped to meet to negotiate the deal is absent from Berlin, I’m afraid.’ That kind of dismally uninventive coding.

  SB had said: ‘Patience. Take advantage of all local resources to complete these sales, please, Stanley.’

  From this, Mount deduced that because of the emergency his work had been raised to a full, official, operational status: ‘take advantage of all local resources’ meant the British embassy. SB had sounded badly concerned. Now, Mount could use the embassy’s services and, if necessary, consult the Service’s permanent resident there – Head of Passport Control, as he was listed, a standard cover. And, via the embassy, Mount had sent a detailed memorandum of the Toulmin report to SB yesterday, though only after a disturbing snag or two caused a few hours’ delay. With the report also went, of course, a reassurance for SB that Toulmin had turned up and was safe.

  Toulmin had left for work immediately after breakfast yesterday, and Mount decided to do the obvious: get to the embassy, a.m. if possible, and send a summary of the Russia stuff. It was smack-on relevant to SB’s thinking. The core of the proposals discussed in Moscow, according to Toulmin, would stipulate that neither Russia nor Germany would join a grouping of powers threatening the other. The treaty should last ten years, with a possible extension for another five. The futures of Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Baltic states – Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania – were considered. Secret ‘rearrangements’ for these territories would be negotiated, meaning that in a carve up Germany and Russia would have properly defined ‘spheres of influence’ and each would respect these. Russia was given an assurance that Germany didn’t want Bessarabia.

  But first, before dispatching this, Mount had given the girls some breakfast, too. Didn’t they deserve proper hospitality? Money alone might have made things seem only businesslike and cold. Neither the girls nor Mount would have liked that. Mount didn’t mind paying them Toulmin’s share. He felt this fell within the reasonable duties of a host. He was sure that, in the same way, if he and the girls spent time with Toulmin in the Lichtenberg apartment, he would have taken care of the fees – possibly using money given him by Mount for work as an agent. It was that kind of civilized social concord.

  He tabulated recollections now: (1) CHAIRS.

  When the girls had gone, Mount was about to set out to the embassy, but met his elderly woman neighbour again on the stairs. She said: ‘In one way, I’m happy to say, matters have greatly improved. Now, I don’t see any more broken chair parts in my bin.’

  ‘Bad times do pass if only one is strong.’

  ‘But, forgive me, I speak selfishly. Are there, perhaps, pieces of chair in your bin?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘It was a temporary, very untypical matter.’

  ‘However, I’ve noticed two men of a furtive nature watching the apartments from near the service lane opposite outside. Have you noticed such men?’

  ‘“Of a furtive nature”?’

  ‘Shifty. Intent.’

  ‘Are they there now?’ he said.

  ‘This morning they are in a car. I have reported them to the police. They might be connected to the business with the chair pieces. Is it a plot of some kind? This is a question that must be asked. What is the connection between these men and the dismembered chairs? They were not carrying anything of the sort when I saw them, but it is surely a worry that they should lurk like this. We are not used to such situations in this part of Steglitz – ruined furniture and loiterers. The police were surprised to hear of the chair fragments in such an area.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure. What did they say?’

  ‘That they might look into it. One of them told me he would examine the log of past incidents in Steglitz over a period of years and see if any of them concerned broken chairs. They haven’t called on me yet.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘But perhaps they will. I said the matter had to be regarded as urgent.’

  ‘Well, yes.’ God, he might have to get rid of all the birch and metal laminated chairs in case the police did come and began to ask tenants as a matter of urgency about these fragments. They would see the resemblance between the chairs in Mount’s apartment and the bits described by his neighbour. Then, all sorts of questions might start.

  He had turned back on the stairs and struck his forehead a slight palm blow to signify forgetfulness. ‘Excuse me, I must return to my apartment. I’ve left the Berlin guide book behind. I’m going to look at Steglitz town hall today. It’s been recommended to me as of great architectural interest. Although I come frequently to the apartment here, you know, somehow I’ve never gone to see the town hall. It’s remiss of me. The book has notes.’

  ‘You are British, I think. In your country, perhaps, they don’t have town halls of this type, this grandeur. Very handsome. Nineteenth-century neo-Gothic.’

  ‘That period is often underrated.’

  Mount had gone back to his apartment and found the book. It would do as a prop. But, really, he’d wanted to check on the street outside. He glanced from the window and saw a parked Mercedes. It was near an old, aggressively simple election poster, stuck to one of the service lane walls. Mount had noticed it on his first stay in Steglitz years ago. Rather weathered now, it would presumably have been for the presidential contest of 1932: a Hitler mugshot on a black background with his surname in big, white, plain sans serif capital letters underneath. It didn’t work for him then, but the next year, 1933, he’d made it to
Chancellor and dictatorship.

  He tabulated: (2) SURVEILLANCE recollections.

  The watching car meant an embassy trip at present could be foolish, a give-away – if there was anything left to give away. Postpone it, he’d decided. The town hall called. ‘Get diversionary, Marcus Mount,’ it said. When he went out, he saw there were two men in the car: one, very tall, at the wheel; the other, shorter, had the passenger seat. They showed indifference to him. To be expected. They’d have been trained in acting out boredom, as Mount himself had been: ‘Today, lads and lasses, you learn deadpan: don’t alert a target by revealing interest.’ And there’d been tips on how to swivel your eyes without swivelling your head, and on how, laboriously, to assemble nonchalance.

  But Mount naturally wondered whether these might be the two who had arrived at Lichtenberg with Toulmin – his escort, warders, bodyguards – although the taller man no longer wore the aslant cap. If so, they must somehow have tailed Mount to his flat on Monday night, starting at the plattenbauten hive, along the Lichtenberg streets, on the U-Bahn, then through part of Steglitz. Hell, he’d failed to spot them. Had they witnessed from some concealed nook all the comings and goings at Toulmin’s apartment block; perhaps watched him while he watched the windows of thirty-seven?

  The idea that he’d been viewed while unaware scared Mount. Well, naturally. A spy was supposed to view others unaware of him, not get viewed unaware. The situation shunted him back into long-term anxieties about his competence, and, therefore, his and others’ safety. At training school, Mount had been weak at tailing and at dodging tails. They said he had ‘a severe, though correctable, deficiency in whereabouts awareness’, owing to self-absorption. This they’d described as a serious fault in an intelligence operative, and one he’d better get rid of. They’d made self-absorption sound sort of dreamy and frothy, like a romantic movement poet. In several of the surprise exercises an instructor would get up close and culpably unnoticed to Mount when he was walking or tubing to work in London. What could have been the muzzle of a pistol would jab at his kidneys. Actually, it was only a ratty, stiff finger masquerading for the occasion, and for the wake-up sermon, as the muzzle of a pistol. ‘Were you thinking of cunt, cunt?’ an instructor had asked after the fourth of these lapses. ‘You could be dead, sonny boy. Do attend to your deficiency in whereabouts awareness. It’s time you noticed that whereabouts are everywhere, which is why they’re called whereabouts.’

  Mount would have had to admit that sometimes he was thinking of cunt, especially on the tube where there was so much of it to incite interest, clothed but still thinkable about. He didn’t admit it, partly because the instructor who’d mock-pistol poked him on that occasion was a woman. To Mount, it would have seemed indelicate, even though she’d clearly been the one to bring cunt into things. These days, women appeared in many jobs that previously had been more or less reserved for men. And some spoke like men – perhaps felt especially qualified to refer to cunt.

  He hadn’t been able to see much of Toulmin’s companions’ features at Lichtenberg, but, after his quick gaze at the Mercedes, he thought the taller man had a jagged, bony profile, a sharp, Mr Punch chin and a prominent nose. His mate looked plumpish, sallow, round-faced, thick necked. He’d do well under a hook-on Santa Claus beard or touting for customers outside a nude show. In the car, he’d been smoking a small cigar.

  Mount had continued towards the town hall, flourishing the booklet in his swinging left hand. He hadn’t looked back. It might have shown he knew about them. When he arrived, he walked slowly around the building twice, by turns gazing and studying the notes in his guide. He aped awe, a neo-Gothic worshipper close to ecstasy. But was it credible that anyone could think this bristlingly ugly, pretentious, lumpy creation deserved a visit, unless you wanted to go in and pay your rates or complain about holes in the roads? Mount liked a building’s appearance to match its purpose, but this one seemed made to browbeat, to nauseate, to repel.

  He had the impression that both men from the car had come on foot with him, but he never saw them, although his devotions around the town hall now allowed him to look about in all directions. Mount might himself be poor at the tailing and counter-tailing game, but he could recognize its skills in others. These two seemed to have most of the tricks, invisibility included, despite the Mr Punch chin and the tree-trunk neck. No deficiency in whereabouts awareness had hampered Mount here. His nerves saw to that. Awareness he had by the tun and ton. Training school had said his deficiency in whereabouts awareness was correctable. He’d corrected it.

  But he still failed to locate the stalkers, suppose they were stalkers. And if he did suppose it, the meaning was harsh: they knew of his association with Toulmin – may even have seen Toulmin leave the building earlier that day, making for the Foreign Ministry. And possibly they’d also observed Inge and Olga arrive or depart or both, though perhaps the watchers could not be sure which apartment they’d visited. Mount might have several lives dependent on him. The training would say it didn’t matter much as long as they were foreign lives, ‘collateral lives’, but, in his sloppy way, he couldn’t go along with that.

  He’d spent about an hour at the town hall, then returned to his apartment. The Mercedes had still been there, though empty by then. He’d watched it from the window – concealed again, he hoped, by the drawn back curtain, as at thirty-seven. And after a while the two men had reappeared, walking, from the direction of the town hall, and climbed into the car. Furtive? Shifty? Mount would have said ‘purposeful’, ‘unshowy’. What had they thought of the architecture?

  Not long after this, two other men had arrived in a blue Opel Olympia. They left their vehicle and got into the back of the Mercedes. Furtive? Shifty? Mount would have said ‘urgent’, ‘alert’. The two men in the front turned and the four of them seemed to chat. Mount thought it must be a briefing session for the Olympia relief team, a changing of the guard. His ostentatiously reverent visit to the town hall would be described and his attempt to semaphore innocence with the tourist book. He would be described. Perhaps Toulmin and the girls would be described. Yes, Mount had lives dependent on him.

  Soon, the Olympia crew returned to their own car and the Mercedes drove off. Mount had moved away from the window. The two in the Mercedes, and those two who’d taken over from them, plainly believed he didn’t realize they were there, or the sentry job would have been split: one to watch the front of the building, one the back – though, of course, there might be another unit at the back, not seen by Mount or the woman on the stairs.

  Perhaps these watchers at the front had heard of Mount’s whereabouts awareness deficiency and couldn’t know it had just been cauterized. And perhaps he might have been unaware of them, but for his neighbour on the stairs again with her anxious adjectives and refusal to rest easy. He’d still felt he must get to the embassy as soon as he could.

  Now, at the Toledo, Mount tabulated recollections: (3) MOSCOW.

  One of the other main disclosures from Toulmin at breakfast yesterday morning had been that there were signs of a growing importance of Molotov, while Litvinov sank – Molotov a much tougher proposition for Britain, of course, and probably much closer to Uncle Joe. In Toulmin’s view, Germany and Russia were each terrified of the other. Hitler was scared of the Red Army. That was partly why he wanted Czechoslovakia, though he’d postponed the actual assault. Toulmin could sense that Hitler was worried a Russian attack could come that way and reach east Germany in a flash. But, Toulmin also got the impression from some Moscow gossip that Stalin probably knew what a mess the Red Army was in – since he’d purged more than half the generals. ‘He doesn’t want conflict with Germany, not at present, because the Russian military is nowhere near up to scratch.’ Stalin, it became plain, trusted nobody, especially not his friends and potential allies. ‘Apparently, he listens only to Nikolai Yezhov, the “poison Dwarf”, head of their Organizational Bureau and so on,’ Toulmin had said. ‘Yezhov tells him there are enemies everywhere
, determined to destroy the Soviet Union. Many were inside Russia and had to be eliminated. So, the Terror. But some were other nations and must be treated as likely, dangerous aggressors. For the moment Yezhov is powerful, perhaps third after Molotov and Stalin. Yezhov nourishes Stalin’s phobias.’ According to Toulmin, both countries sought friendship, as protection. Or appeared to.

  Mount tabulated recollections: (4) SURVEILLANCE (continued).

  It had been crucial to get this material to Stephen Bilson as soon as possible. So, Mount had decided he’d exit from the rear and somehow get to the embassy, if the Olympia pair looked likely to remain in the car for a while. He returned to the edge of the window and looked down. The men were still together in the Opel. Good.

  The next time Mount peered out, an hour or two later, the man in the passenger seat had a wireless handset up to his ear. Mount decided to wait and watch. After a few minutes, the man put away the handset and spoke to the driver. Their conversation was brief, but seemed animated, and then Mount heard the Olympia’s engine start. The car pulled out from its parking spot, turned right at the end of the street, like the Mercedes, and disappeared.

  Again Mount waited. Perhaps they would circle, and then vary their parking position on return, hoping to be less obvious. They couldn’t have gone for keeps, could they? What was happening? Did it make sense to relax their vigil, maybe abandon it? Everyone knew that surveillance had to be continuous or it became useless. When you resumed after a break you might be starting surveillance on a totally changed situation. There could have been quick, secret departures, quick, secret arrivals, though you did not know it. Perhaps the woman’s complaint to the police had been passed on and the Opel couple told they were too noticeable there. Perhaps the men had detected the woman watching and decided they’d switch.